Dayton Clarence Miller was born on March 13, 1866, in Ohio, and died on February 22, 1941. He was a physicist, astronomer, and acoustician.

Miller graduated from Baldwin University in 1886 and received his doctoral degree in astronomy at Princeton University in 1890. In 1893, he began to teach physics at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio, where he served as head of the physics department until his retirement in 1936. From 1900 onwards, Miller worked with Edward W. Morley on the experiments on aether drift that had been initiated by Albert A. Michelson in 1887.

As well as his endeavors in physics, Miller was interested in acoustics. In 1908, he invented a machine, the phonodeik, that enabled him to record sound waves photographically. Miller was also an accomplished flautist and owned a collection of more than 1,650 flutes, today held by the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Miller was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and president of the Acoustical Society of America from 1931 to 1933. He also served as secretary, vice president, and president of the American Physical Society and as chairman of the division of Physical Sciences of the National Research Council.

Key Publications:

• Miller, Dayton. Laboratory Physics, a Student’s Manual for Colleges and Scientific Schools. New York: Ginn, 1903.
• Miller, Dayton. “Extract from a Letter dated Cleveland, Ohio, August 5th, 1904, to Lord Kelvin from Profs. Edward W. Morley and Dayton C. Miller.” Philosophical Magazine (ser. 6) 8, no. 48 (1904): 753–754.
• Miller, Dayton, and Edward Morley (1905): “On the Theory of Experiments to detect Aberrations of the Second Degree.” Philosophical Magazine (ser. 6) 9, no. 53 (1905): 669–680.
• Miller, Dayton. “Photographic Registration of Sounds,” Physical Review 28, no. 2 (1909): 151.
• Miller, Dayton. The Science of Musical Sounds. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916.
• Miller, Dayton. “The Influence of the Material of Wind-Instruments on the Tone Quality,” Science 29 (1909): 161–171.
  
• Miller, Dayton. Sound Waves: Their Shape and Speed. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1937.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayton_Miller

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayton_C._Miller

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_theory_of_relativity

Picture: CC0 | Wikimedia